Drupal for news publisher

Hi,

I'm developing a site using Drupal for a newspaper, and it requires a fairly complex layout. I'm hoping the community can help to validate my proposed solution. The site's content consists primarily of articles, but also has a home page, section homes, category indexes and topic pages.

Home page and section homes: very complex layouts based on a grid system showing 30-40 stories, some with large headlines, some with images, some just text links, all editorially chosen based on importance of story. Something like the BBC News homepage (http://news.bbc.co.uk). Crucially, it must be possible for editors to change the layout of the page to suit the 'news pattern' of the day. For example, on 9/11 we would have wanted to replace our normal 30-40 story layout with a 10-15 story layout to make room for a huge breaking news unit at the top. The same would be true of any one-a-year kind of story like London winning the 2012 olympics, the stock market crash in September, etc. And the editors need to be able to do this without rewriting the template.

Category indexes: Chronological lists of subcategories and articles within the category ("Business news")

Topic pages: Chronological list of articles in the topic, with additional intro text and banner ("The US Election coverage")

It's been suggested to me that everything other than the article pages is a View, and that the complex views all have their own template per page. However, it seems to me that a layering of nodes would make more sense, and be more flexible. We could have a content type for the home page, whose template simply tiles lumps of content across and down the page, then have various other content types such as '6 story unit', 'breaking news unit', '3 story with pics unit', 'story rotator unit', etc where the nodes created using these content types would have properties that define which articles are used to populate them. The home page would then in turn have properties defining which content unit nodes should make up the content on the page.

This solution is inspired by reading about the Drupal Markup engine developed by PingVision (http://drupal.org/project/dme).

Any thoughts on this?